Description

Painkiller is a "bullet hell" first-person shooter with a gothic storyline and frantic gameplay.

Players are cast as Daniel Garner, a regular guy who gets killed in a horrific car crash while taking his wife out for her birthday. She, being the saintly woman she is, gets admitted to Heaven. Daniel, due to his shady past, does not. He finds himself in Purgatory -- a place somewhere between Heaven and Hell. It isn't long before Daniel is recruited by his "caseworker for the dead" to fight the minions of Hell. Lucifer is plotting to overthrow Heaven, and is using Purgatory as a staging ground. The offer is simple: stop Lucifer's armies and earn Daniel's heavenly reward.

A month later, on November 20, 2004, the CPL announced that they had cut a deal with Dreamcatcher Interactive that gives them worldwide rights for the use of multiplayer Painkiller in any online or live tournament with cash or merchandise prizes.

German version

In the German version, blood was re-colored green and enemies don't burst.

Leak

In January 2004, four months prior to the release, a hefty multi-player alpha build was leaked to the internet. Dreamcatcher was unable to trace the source and could only warn fans that the leak was not representative for the final game.

Patch

The latest patches (1.61 and higher) adds new graphic features, such as the Bloom effect and more resolutions. Two more weapons are also added, an SMG with a Flame Thrower and another gun similar to the shotgun and Stake Gun.

Protagonist

Daniel Garner, the hero of Painkiller, was originally envisioned and prototyped as slick, gun-toting Latin American with a wardrobe reminiscent of Miami Vice, before being reinvented as a the tough and troubled everyman he is in the final game.

Technology

Painkiller is one of the few games that doesn't force real-time rendering for it's video display. Usually whenever a game or program has a graphic load that exceeds the hardware's performance it starts to "skip" the rendering of certain frames in order to maintain the timing of the animations as intended. This results in the familiar "frame-skipping" or "jumping" that we known so well.

Another alternative to this problem is to forget about trying to maintain real-time animation and draw every frame at the speed the hardware can manage, however this is hardly used for videogames and usually only appears as an option on 3D rendering programs. The reason for this can be seen on Painkiller and that's because if you play it on a machine that's below the recommended specs, the game will be actually easier to play. As whenever the CPU load gets too high (which starts to happen when many enemies appear) the game goes into slo-mo.

Awards

Computer Games Magazine

March 2005 - #3 Game of the Year 2004

Computer Gaming World

March 2005 (Issue #249) – Single-Player Shooter of the Year

March 2005 (Issue #249) – Best Weapon of the Year (for The Painkiller)

Related Web Sites

All About Painkiller (Fan site about Painkiller and its add-on, Battle out of Hell, with gallery, guide, secrets, videos, etc.)

Hall of Pain (Fan shrine to Painkiller and its add-on with a complete list of enemies, videos, a mod created by Varus, the webmaster, called The Hills and an interactive Tarot Guide. Also available in German.)